A Little Friday Morning Feminist Rant
This morning as I scowled into the mirror, reading glasses on the end of my nose, tweezers ready to attack a somewhat coarse and rather startling white hair which was sprouting from my chin, I felt the familiar bubble of rage against the patriarchy in my belly. Why are women gaslit into believing it’s unnatural for us to have facial hair? Every single woman I know over 30 has facial hair, and many even younger. I thought of my friend in her twenties with polycystic ovary syndrome, who shaves her face daily and believes herself ugly because of this; My Indian friend with thick dark hair who goes through a bi-weekly threading torture just to feel ok. Men though, beards are sexy on men aren’t they? Or so we have been told. My angry thoughts drifted to body image, God forbid a woman have an ounce of excess flesh, yet there’s the ‘dad bod’ apparently a man being a little bit chunky is sexy and perfectly acceptable (insert eye roll). If a woman loses her hair it’s a really big deal and even women going through the ordeal of chemotherapy are encouraged to wear an uncomfortable itchy wig to keep up their appearance, but it’s absolutely acceptable for a man to go bald at twenty and on the disparity goes.
It fascinates and angers me in equal measure. How did we get here? How have we allowed this systematic destruction of our equity and body autonomy to happen? Yes I know it’s continued for centuries and the things that I mention here are trivial compared to the far bigger issues faced by women throughout the world, but really how?
When I did some work around healing my mother wound a few years back, Bethany Webster in her book ‘Discovering the inner mother’, blames the mother wound on patriarchal conditioning, she expresses that it is passed down through our bloodlines, generation after generation. Stay small, keep quiet, be a good girl, don’t stand out. Our mothers don’t mean to dim our light, they believe they are protecting us. Personally I feel this goes all the way back to the burning times, when sisters turned on sisters. If I point the finger at you, I am less likely to be condemned as a witch, and so we learned to fear each other, to mistrust other women, so many of us are unconsciously carrying internal misogyny. ‘Look at her’, ‘who does she think she is’, ‘she loves herself’, ‘she’s too big for her boots’ are all phrases I grew up hearing. This division, I believe, is how they have kept us in oppression for so long. Please note here that I am not a man hater, I like men, I feel that this paradigm has damaged them in so many ways too and we simply cannot have the divine feminine without also honouring the sacred masculine. Nevertheless this paradigm is simply no longer fit for purpose, not that it ever was, but how do we change it? I believe by gathering together, women in groups are a force to be reckoned with, yet another reason for them to keep us divided. I see more and more people offering sister circles and womens walking clubs. This gives me so much hope for the future, a future I will likely not live to be a part of, but one I hope I can have some small impact on shaping.
With love and blessings.
